Harnessing

Read this before anything else

Everywhere else on this wiki the Dark takes, and a man is the door.

Here it is the other way round, and that is the whole of why the practices exist. It is the only relationship in the field that runs in our favour, it is rare, and it is difficult on purpose.

Harnessing is this wiki's name for the abilities in Category:Practices that treat The Dark as a means, not as a counterparty. Psychic Energy is the medium all of them work in. contested

Three clusters are documented, and they are not three techniques — they are three uses of the same two properties, that the Dark holds no distance and no time:

Sight

Third eye, Remote Viewing, Divination, Mind Divers. Looking through it — elsewhere, elsewhen, or into someone.

Concealment

The inverse. Using the same absence of distance so that nothing arrives at you. It works on the Others as well as on people, and it costs your sight, because the aperture has no direction.

Instrumentation

Putting an object where a practitioner would be. The oldest of the three and the only one that does not need a person to be open.

No Other is involved

This is the distinction that matters and the wiki has never stated it plainly. firsthand · Gershon

The Seekers entry has carried it for years: the Dark itself is benign — in its emptiness it allows for great feats of psychic power for the learned and experienced seeker. And then, immediately: a deal with a devil only requires a certain combination of stupidity, desperation and arrogance.

Two roads, and everything follows from which one a seeker takes:

Harnessing

Uses the properties of the Dark — that it has no distance in it, and does not hold time the way the material world does. Nothing is negotiated because there is nothing to negotiate with. The cost is entirely in the practitioner: preparation, discipline, years. inherited

Bargaining

Uses the inhabitants. Fast, available to anyone, requires no skill whatever, and every entry in Category:Others describes what it costs. inherited

Others states flatly that nothing out of the Dark has ever been described as good. Read against that, harnessing is not merely the harder road — it is the only route that does not involve dealing with something that means you harm. The wiki's bleakest finding turns out to be an argument for the arts. contested

Why this is the real argument against inoculation

Inoculation lists the bodies opposing severance and gives each a reason: the Vatican theologically, the Frankists messianically, the Elder Cults to preserve a lineage. Those are the stated reasons. This is the one underneath most of them. unverified

A closed population cannot produce practitioners. Whatever the aperture is, it is the same aperture the arts run through, and a programme that seals it does not merely protect people from what comes in — it destroys a human capacity, permanently, in everyone it reaches. On this reading inoculation is not triage. It is the largest amputation ever performed, carried out on a population that was not told what was being removed. contested

The wiki should be honest about the shape of that argument: it is the only case against inoculation that is not theological, and it is made exclusively by the people who would lose the capability. We are not disinterested and this is the entry where that matters most. ⚠ warning

The asymmetric position

The CIA is not on either side of the axis, and the position it does hold is easy to read as a contradiction. contested

They are in favour of inoculation, operationally and enthusiastically — and simultaneously running Remote Viewing and Mind Divers, which are harnessing programmes and require the aperture their other programmes are closing.

There is no contradiction. The position is: closed for the population, open for the operators. A capability is worth more when nobody else has it, and a general severance that exempts a few hundred cleared people converts a common human faculty into a state monopoly. It is the same structure as the City of London's metered door with capability as the currency instead of money, and it is probably the most accurate description of how any power in this field actually behaves. astroturf

Whether any of it works

The entry would be dishonest without this. ⚠ warning

Every practice in this cluster is downstream of Operation Paperclip and inherits its founding doubt: for the two decades in which these programmes were built, the men reporting the enemy's capability and the men constituting the response were substantially the same men. The Materialist Cult holds a defector account saying both sides found nothing, wrote it down, and kept the budget.

So it is entirely possible that harnessing does not work, has never worked, and that the arts are a discipline maintained around an absence — which would make this entry's argument against inoculation an argument for preserving a capacity nobody has. We hold no demonstration. What we hold is a body of practitioners who report results to each other. contested

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The four practice entries read as a class, the Seekers entry's two-roads passage, and the doubt inherited from Operation Paperclip.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: The grouping is ours and the four entries do not know they belong to it. The capability argument against inoculation is made here by people who benefit from it. The asymmetric-position section is an inference about an institution's reasoning from its behaviour, which is the weakest move this wiki makes, and it is satisfying in the way that should make a recruit suspicious.

Wanted: A demonstration. Any result from any of these practices, produced in front of someone who did not already believe.